We are concerned with the grave human rights situation in the Bajo Aguán region of Honduras and ask the State Department to take effective steps to address it. The abuses taking place in this area of the country reflect a larger pattern of human rights violations in which human rights defenders, journalists, community leaders and opposition activists are the subject of death threats, attacks, and extrajudicial executions.

We ask you to suspend U.S. assistance to the Honduran military and police given the credible allegations of widespread, serious violations of human rights attributed to the security forces.

And all the relevant committee members knew exactly what was going on. They knew for example, in El Salvador:

officials of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. armed forces have:

• supplied ANSESAL, the security forces, and the general staff with electronic, photographic, and personal surveillance of individuals who were later assassinated by death squads. According to Colonel Nicolas Carranza, director of the Salvadoran Treasury Police, such intelligence sharing by U.S. agencies continues to this day;

• instructed Salvadoran intelligence operatives in the use of investigative techniques, combat weapons, explosives, and interrogation methods that included, according to a former Treasury Police agent “instruction in methods of physical and psychological torture”; (1)

I know because Allan Nairn, the author of this expose testified before the Senate Intelligence Committe shortly after it was released and he said it felt like they were interigating him to see how much he knew and how he knew it. Plus as he points out in this interview, they had access to all the C.I.A. and Pentagon files:

AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at a full-page ad that The Progressive took out in the Washington Post, "Behind the Death Squads," an exclusive report on the U.S. role in Salvador’s official terror. Can you talk about the effect of this, and how this information was made known?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, based on some of those interviews that I just described and also U.S. internal documents I did that article for The Progressive. They published, I think it was May of 1984 and it was almost completely ignored by the corporate press. There was no notice whatsoever. So then The Progressive went out and raised money from various donors, and they were able to buy a full-page ad in the Washington Post where they reprinted about a third of the article. This got some attention in Washington.

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee then asked me to come in, and meet with them. So I did in a closed session and was questioned by dozens of the Intelligence Committee staff for about three or four hours about what the U.S. had done to back and create the Salvadoran death squads. Now this was a bit curious since they were the ones, who had security clearance, who had access to the C.I.A. and Pentagon files. They were the ones who worked with them, indeed funded them, but they were asking me, I think in part maybe to try to find out how much I knew. What I knew is what I printed in the magazine, but I was trying to spur them to investigate. And they did.

They then launched an investigation where they say they examined more than a million internal documents. They produced a 400 page report, which was heavily classified. They told me that only two copies of the report were produced, one was in a sealed room that only — kept on Capitol Hill, which only the Senators on the committee could read, and another at the C.I.A. headquarters. A public report was released, which said nothing. Some of the Senators told me that the classified–they told me a little bit about the classified report. They said they had verified that in fact, yes, the U.S. had set up these death squads in Salvador and also that U.S. personnel had sometimes been on the premises during torture sessions and had supplied questions for the prisoners being tortured.

As a reporter he has gathered facts in El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and other countries where amoral regimes have murdered and suppressed their own people and been rewarded by weapons or the succor of economic aid from Washington. Nairn specializes in human rights stories. As valuable as the annual reports of such organizations as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International may be, they remain abstract compilations of horrors, not muddy-boot accounts from Third World villages and streets where people chance their lives to practice the simplest of freedoms. Nairn goes further: exposing links between local violence - clubbing Timorese students, death squads in El Salvador, disappearances in Guatemala - to the sanctioning of that violence by successive arms-supplying U.S. administrations.

Last edited by Horhey; Apr 14 2012 at 10:04 PM.

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